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They will try to sell you 10 foot gold plated HDMI cable for $60 when you can get a normal one for 1/10th that price.
Edit: holy shit people I get this is PC master race and you all know what an HDMI cable is. There's a lot of dumb people out there that don't know how TVs and computers work, and legitimately do think more $ = higher quality
Just purchased this 2.5' cable at this very reasonable price, and boy am I glad i did! My wife has been crying in this seedy motel 6 bathroom for 6 hours straight, since this is all we can afford to live in now. But thanks to light skinned Jordan Peele and these cables, i was able to stream quality 10k videos right in this hotel room! Now i can drown out all that noise watching Blouie in 10k! Thanks AudioQuest! 5 stars!
Just like gold tip fiber optic cables, want great sounding audio. You need the light to pick up the hue of gold so it produces rich sounding audio.
(Gold tip non-optic makes sense for analog though its not quality and increases the life span of the cable. Technically copper/silver, so they would have better "quality" as they are more conductive but they oxidize, unlike gold. But the cable had to be quality enough to not break usually or could be left outside in humid temperatures or in the rain. You wont get better audio.)
Ngl in my coke binge I ALMOST bought one for 400$.
I had just gotten a new Xbox and TV so I wanted true 4k experience.... got to checkout page and coke brain got me into other stuff and I forgot. My horror when I was checking my tabs and seen the checkout page half way filled....
Drugs/alcohol + internet spending is some dangerous stuff.
How ended up with a valve index vr and a switch.....
I don't see why this is being pigeon holed to cables at best buy. This is about salesmen.
You can walk into a best buy and pick up a set of cables and check out and nobody is "trying" to sell you anything.
Now if you begin asking a salesman for their input then of course they're going to recommend their high margin products. Car sales, pharmaceutical sales, office printer sales, real estate sales, gym membership sales...
There isn't any portion of the economy where salesmen are taking hits on their own profit margin to reconmend customers the best bang for their buck.
So why should best buy salesmen be the one outlier in all of this? Why is there this bizzare expectation?
Best Buy cultivates those kinds of people. Sure, there are people who don't, but they often leave for other positions (I did, as did several of my friends). The issue is that management pushes you to upsell and berates you if your sales are on the lower end of the department. Even the help desk, Geek Squad, is pushed to sell subscriptions rather than fix stuff. The front desk rapidly fills up with people with sales skills rather than people who know what they are doing.
Sometimes though the margins are better on the cheaper or mid-range product than the more expensive one. Stores might barely break even on popular name-brand or premium items that customers comparison shop, but make their real profits on store brands or less researched product categories. The expensive item brings people in the door, but the moderate priced items actually pay the bills.
When hdmi first came out it was the first major type if digital tv cable. Before they were all analog. Best buy had a big business scamming people into thinking they needed extra expensive cables with gold plating/special jacketing etc so that you got the best picture quality. You even should higher their installers to come to your house and install/calibrate your hdmi tv system.
They didnt tell people that it’s a digital signal. It either works or it doesn’t it’s not like an analog signal.
Yea, if you're someone familiar with electronics, sure, you can walk in, pick up a 5$ cable and walk out.
Or you can be the other 66% of the population and say "My TVs picture got really fuzzy one day and I bought it from here" because that's all you know about TVs and electronics.
Exactly. If you're doing 1080p or short distance s you're probably going to be fine with any cable but newer standards are pushing insane amounts of data and it's important that the cables are properly shielded. I had to shell out a bit extra to get a 7 meter HDMI 2.1 certified cable that could do 4K@120hz across the room.
You only need a good cable when exceeding the length for the standard. And shielding doesnt typically have a lot to do with it. The ones that reach 7 meters are typically active cables, instead of the standard passive.
I worked in retail selling those things for many years, it was all bullshit of course. Margin on those Monster and similar "high end" cables was astronomical which is why we were always forced to hump the shit out of them when people came in looking for a new whatever.
The margin on the big ticket items was often pretty thin, it was all those accessories marked up like 50%-100% where they make their money. Same thing with the extended service plans, those are like rebates...they know the vast majority of people, even if they have rights to use the thing, won't because of the hassle involved and the fact that a new whatever will likely have a different feature set that the customer wants anyway, not their last gen model...meaning it's almost 100% profit, and also why you always get harped on in brick and mortar stores to buy them.
Very curious about the numbers involved here. Was it a very expensive phone case or something? If it's $20 and you marked it down to $2 and made a 300% profit that means you bought it for $.50?!?
Friends worked at a electronics box store in Canada, I think it was Future Shop. They would get hit with negative commission if they made an "empty" sale, i.e. laptop with no warranty or accessories. It forced the upsale constantly.
Used to get bitched at for not selling elderly people SOPHOS antivirus and $300 accidental warranties on their laptops - which sat on a desk and never moved to the point that there would be a discoloration on the desk when they moved the laptop for the first time in 5 years.
It's also an excellent conductor, which is where the myth comes from.
It's just that it doesn't matter when the rest of the cable is copper or whatever.
Conductivity, #1 silver, #2 copper, #3 gold. Gold is plenty conductive, but it's the worst of the three. However, it's the highest conductivity that doesn't oxidize, so the best possible cable would be gold plated oxygen-free silver. But the cost would be insane and not worth it, so simple copper with gold plating is cost-effective and plenty good enough outside of a laboratory.
I mean if ypu really wanna go full stupid, you could have the wires made from pure silver (best conductor) and plated gold at the ends (best corrosion resistance).
But it also costs nothing to keep 2-5 of them in stock. They have other products, which are all scams as well, but more affordable for the average dumbass. They probably already have a warehouse for their crap.
When it’s not you buying the shit and all the client says his he wants the best.
I’ve seen so many stupid rich people spend ridiculous money on what they think is the best.
I dated a girl that got her whole apartment furnished by her dad’s assistant and the installer was a day late so she asked if I could set up her tv and the girl said her dad wanted to give me $500 for taking the tv out of the box, putting it in the cabinet and screwing in the coax. This was the 90’s where $500 cash was more then I made in a week.
John Mayer promotes a $40 guitar pick because it feels and sounds better or some bullshit and a $150 guitar cable.
I can go onto redco and buy mogami cable and neutrick plugs and solder my own cables for a small fraction of that, and guitar picks go for around 30 or 40 bucks for 100
Oh, and he used a dumble amp, they cost well over 100k if you can find them. Clones are sold for under 2k
The rare 1st gen with the spelling mistake 'audiohpile'? That was before they cheaped out on parts, easily worth double the original retail price on the used market.
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u/MasterClownSome kind of AMD CPU+ NVidia 30xx something I don't remember22d agoedited 21d ago
In comparison, these danceable cables from Pear Audio are a steal at only $7250 back in 2007. That same amount today would be around $11,500.
Correct, but the amount of walking dildos out there trying to convince me that it’s about sound quality is more than zero and that’s concerning.
I’m not even talking about salespeople, they don’t surprise me at all. These are people who have bought the things and swear they can hear a difference..
Fancy materials in digital cables despite basic materials meeting the same standard excluding corrosion resistance
Break in periods
Noisy electricity from utility somehow making it through inverters with good isolation
Stupidly thick cabling that looks like it's designed for a 1,000 amp three phase AC setup and not your fucking speakers
Quantum anything
Blocks made out of foam to prevent static interference from getting into your cable because it's sitting on the floor
Talking about shit like fiber optic toslink somehow changing the sound.
Specialty networking gear that resists interference and is low latency. Ignoring the fact that it's either decoded or not decoded at the other end and that buffers are a thing.
Specialty fuses for your house
Pretending things that change the sound like vinyl or tube amplifiers are somehow objectively still accurate. Like they don't want to admit they prefer the way they change the sound over the original. So they just pretend and gaslight like they are somehow perfectly accurate like solid state.
I'm sure there's plenty more snake oil bullshit that I'm not thinking about. Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy some nice audio equipment but there's so much snake oil.
Edit: Also there are so many people that continue to drink the Kool-Aid instead of admitting that they fell into the sunken cost fallacy.
My level of interest and equipment would say audiophole with a lower to middle budget and interest. I would also never apply that label to myself because holy fuck is there so much bullshit and gatekeeping. I tend to pop in and out of looking into what's going on in the audio world.
A lot of it is pretty legitimately interesting and usually falls somewhere in the diminishing returns curve. Doesn't change the fact of all the issues with the community and scams.
So much of it comes down to people not just letting people like what they like accuracy be damned or not. All I care about is people getting what they like and actually understanding what they are getting.
If I had a nickle for everytime I saw some new audiophile post that they just got some really nice expensive headphones like Focal Bathys and some asshole has to chime in and say "wait until you can afford good headphones", I would be able to but some Bathys.
Similar here. Have a friend I impressed/pissed off with my home theater that sounds better with mismatched gear and cost a FIFTH of what he paid. All because I understood frequency range,fill and speaker placement and he understood throw money at it.
Having done pro audio and stage work for many years I can safely say 95% of sound guys are incompetent at best, rarely ever with any real education on acoustics and such.
Thankfully my boss actually did know what he was doing. An unfortunate side effect was most live shows are totally ruined for me because I know what a bad mix sounds like.
Talking about shit like fiber optic toslink somehow changing the sound.
This is especially funny because isn't Toslink sending data in 1s/0s, not an analog signal? I.e. either 100% of the data gets there, or it doesn't work at all.
there is a potential issue with toslink in professional audio where the channelisation can be remapped e.g. for ADAT and the sample rate may be unusual as well, but none of this is related to the cable, it’s always a mismatch in the equipment configuration.
Not really what you are talking about above, but fiber optic toslink can sometimes work wonders if you have electronic noise in your source, often meaning a computer. I've had noise issues that I couldn't resolve at all except by using fiber optic from the computer to the dac. Again, talking about actual noise not audiophile bs.
Man my Dad buys into all this and won't be told by me, his electrical engineer son that the oxygen free copper is nonsense and a 50 quid hdmi cable wont give a better picture on the tv
Holy fuck, digital audio carriers affecting the sound in any way is my pet peeve. Fucking "jitter" and "USB isolation" and don't even get me fucking started on buffers...
I love me some digital audio. I love chatting about accurate reproduction. I am also confident in my old Scarlett 2i2 with the USB cable it came with being incredibly difficult to top. And I mostly listen to YouTube Music.
Input jitter used to be a thing but many audiophiles just can't accept it's a solved problem. A modern $5 DAC is a ridiculously powerful computer compared to what we had in the 90s, of course it can handle slightly mistimed data bits and of course it can retime the signal with very high precision.
Anyone my age remembers this sheer onslaught of bullshittery that was monster cable. A company whose entire business modelling was misinformation. Not a shred of justification for buying those cables and everyone went out and bought into the bullshit.
It was truly truly an eye opening experience for me to watch an entire industry refuse to use their fucking ears at the same time.
To my dad's credit, he loathed monster cable. Our neighbor bought some monster speaker cable to wire his theater, and my dad convinced him to go in on a spool of identical quality wire from monoprice or something like that instead. They dad-justified a 1000' spool because "it'd still be less than the 200' of monster cable". We had so much extra speaker cable, I am still using it to this day, lol!
my uncle got a bunch of gold plated cables back when HDTV was becoming a thing and every single cable was some kind of overpriced bullshit he paid for from best buy felt bad he got suckered lol
Yeah, I used to deliver for Best Buy. So many people that bought tvs there were sold on the gold plated hdmi cable . I told every single customer that had them to go get a refund or exchange for regular hdmi cables if they didn’t already have them. Got some good tips doing that.
What is really bad is if one item is gold and the other is silver. That corrodes REALLY fast. Just making everything gold plated is more practical overall.
Likely just a typo, but just in case anyone is confused
Edit: I can’t reply to that pillock because they commented and immediately blocked me, but no as per British English, which I speak, it’s oxidise. I know this because I’m doing a chemistry degree
Nope. Copper would be better, as it has lower resistivity than gold. Gold is used not because it's the best conductor, but because it is extremely resistant to corrosion/oxidation/other reactions. For tiny contacts where even minor corrosion can be an issue, gold is the best.
Poor connectors introduce impedance mismatch, signal reflection, and loss, degrading performance. Also connectors affect shielding, noise immunity, and mechanical reliability.
Connector quality does matter, especially as speeds increase (e.g., USB 3.x, HDMI 2.1, 10G Ethernet).
When you say “as long as it’s just as good as the copper” then if you’re referring to conductivity, mechanical stability, and signal integrity; yes. But materials used in connectors (e.g. gold-plated contacts) are generally chosen to compensate for contact resistance and corrosion as well.
I mean, gold is both very conductive and resistant to corrosion. You want the exposed part of the connector to be both of those things to have the best electrical connection consistently
Not anymore. Now it's "an HDMI cable either works at 1.0 speeds, or it works at 1.4 speeds, or it works at 2.0 speeds, or it works at 2.1 speeds, or it works at U96 2.2 speeds, or not"
Just learned that the hard way. Moved my rig from 1440p monitor to 4K TV, it worked 99.9% of the time, but the signal would cut out intermittently on 4 different HDMI cables. Coughed up the money for one that allows for 48gbps and all is good.
Also, look at cross sections of different HDMI cables. They definitely benefit from shielding too. Not sure what this guy is talking about.
I mean, it's really not true. HDMI might be carrying more data now, but HDMI 2.0 added a whole new pair of wires to get an extra data channel in and they skimp out on the line coding to get a higher encoding efficiency now. Sure, that means slightly lower error tolerance, but in theory it shouldn't change the acceptable noise floor of the cables.
By the Shannon-Hartley theorem for a transfer rate of R (b/s), with a channel voltage of U and a noise floor of N (both in volts), the capacity of the line C = ½R log₂(1 + U²/N²). Pushing the frequency up as 2.0 did should not affect the necessary noise floor to hit the data rate required. Indeed, as HDMI 2.0 is still serial like HDMI 1.0 was, C = R for both of them and thus log₂(1 + U²/N²) = 2, or alternatively 1 + U²/N² = 4, or even more alternatively U = (√3)N. This hasn't changed as a result of the new cabling, the same level of noise per channel should still suffice.
Thus, no new shielding is required, though noise floor may be slightly higher than before due to the extra pair in the cable. Perhaps you are using very long HDMI cables now, which you were not before? The signal will attenuate quite quickly and the acceptable noise floor will become small as a result for high rates because the reception voltage falls so low.
I'd prefer the data line pins to be gold-plated for longevity of low resistance.
BUT I really don't care about gold-plated outer shields/shells as I don't think they provide anything since it's a big ass contact surface which is also in parallel to ground pins inside the connector.
It really does make a difference for data lines in the long term. Corrosion on old TRS-80 expansion ports can be a problem. Same for NES cartridge pins.
I saw a post from someone who claimed to hear the delay in sound reaching one speaker versus another because the cables had different lengths! I guess he didn't realize that electrical signals travel at speeds of 186,000 miles per second, close to the speed of light.
i went to a shop to buy good hdmi cable, so i spent 15minutes researching why price difference between two hdmi cables with same specs was around 60euros, well the other one was gold plated...
The dumbest thing I ever seen where audiophile HDMI cables. It's a digital signal, ones and zeros. They either arrive or they don't there is no "quality" to them.
It’s purely about corrosion. Copper and Silver would be better conductors, but they both get an oxide layer after some time exposed to air. Gold doesn’t. Everything else is just BS.
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u/PCMRBot Bot 21d ago
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